Wednesday was a bad day to be a journalist.
The Chicago Sun-Times, a respected newspaper in a major U.S. city, made the decision to publish the name of the infamous Chicago Cubs fan who tried to catch a foul ball during Tuesday night’s baseball league championship game.
Cubs left fielder Moises Alou tried to make a play on the ball in the eighth inning, but the fan got there first. The ball wasn’t caught, the Florida Marlins scored eight runs that inning, and the Cubs lost the game.
FOX, the station airing the National League Championship Series, showed the replay again and again, putting the man’s picture in millions of households across the nation.
Later, the cameras showed the man being heckled by nearby fans. Angry attendees cast cups of beer and verbal abuse at the man, who had to be escorted out of the stadium by security officers.
Of course, he was not alone in reaching for the ball. Many other fans grabbed for the playoff souvenir, but only one man was unlucky enough to touch it.
The ball was in the stands, and the umpire ruled that there was no fan interference. The man likely did cost the Cubs an out, and possibly the game. But, to be perfectly clear, the individual did absolutely nothing wrong.
Wednesday morning, the Sun-Times published the gentleman’s name and age. The paper reported where he works and lives. The reporters went to the home where friends and a neighbor said he grew up. They interviewed neighbors and acquaintances of the man after he could not be reached for comment.
Hours after the story was published, the individual issued a public statement in which he released his own name and expressed remorse for the incident. It’s not clear whether the individual would have come forward, were it not for the earlier article.
It would have been disturbing enough to see the man’s name briefly mentioned in the text of the game-recap story. The decision to investigate the man and publish such personal facts is downright sickening.
Journalists have responsibilities. Most papers don’t publish the names of rape victims to protect their privacy. If such an arrangement has been previously agreed upon, journalists won’t reveal the name of a source to protect the individual from persecution. These situations can get tricky, and the rule of thumb is generally this: Is the need to identify the person greater than the harm caused by naming him or her?
Journalists must then weigh their options. Does the public’s need to know outweigh the person’s right to privacy? Would identifying the individual help solve a crime or a missing-person case? Would identifying the person compromise the individual’s ability to live a normal life? Or, perhaps most importantly, would identifying the individual bring the person undue harm?
Depending on the answers, journalists and editors have to make difficult decisions. Sometimes a paper has to do what it thinks is right, even if some people disagree with the decision.
On Wednesday, the Chicago Sun-Times made the wrong decision. There was no justification for running the story.
“It is the biggest news story in town, and this is Chicago,” the Sun-Times editor in chief told Editor & Publisher, a widely read journalism magazine. “We talked about it for a little while and came down on the side of publishing it. It was not 100 to zero, but the decision was made, and on we go.”
The man will be lucky to go on — the paper unduly subjected him to the possibility of harm.
The very same unruly fans who assaulted the individual during Tuesday’s game are now armed with his personal information. Sports fans sometimes riot when their team wins. To then consider what angry Cubs fans could do — especially considering that the Cubs lost the series Wednesday night — is unthinkable.
Perhaps the man should have kept his hands to himself, given the significance of the play. But his decision is forgettable when compared with the sickening actions of the Sun-Times.
As enticing as it may be to stoop to the Sun-Times’ level, integrity won’t permit it. Instead, here are only the names and e-mail addresses of the story’s authors and editor: Annie Sweeney ([email protected]), Frank Main ([email protected]), Chris Fusco ([email protected]) and Michael Cooke ([email protected]).
Perhaps some of the attention should be diverted to these individuals, the potential harm they may have caused the Cubs fan and the disservice they did to the profession of journalism.